


The Wind in Her Hair

by Maidenjedi



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: F/M, Misses Clause Challenge, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-26
Updated: 2011-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-28 04:11:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/303595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maidenjedi/pseuds/Maidenjedi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bev Marsh takes independence however she can get it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wind in Her Hair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [resolute](https://archiveofourown.org/users/resolute/gifts).



> Yuletide Madness 2011. I couldn't resist!

Bev loved to drive.

She had taken to it better than most of her classmates, and all of her friends - the few she had, anyway. She slid behind the wheel without effort, grasped it and held on, knowing immediately that what she felt was independence. Pressing her foot to the gas, she felt it in her to escape.

She was wed to the idea that she could leave, if she chose. Every time she got behind the wheel, she looked in the mirror and whispered goodbye. She hoped to mean it, one of these days.

Just get in the car, and drive.

\---

The last time her father hit her, it was about the car.

He nearly broken her hand in an attempt to take her keys. She hadn't even been going anywhere, not really. She'd just said she was going for a drive, and he'd been like a provoked snake.

She screamed at him, she fought back. Brought the key down across his cheek once, and he spat drunken curse words at her before landing a blow on her cheek

As she ran out the door, the moon laughed. And Bev hit the gas so hard, her wheels skidded for a moment before gaining traction and she heard that laugh grow deeper. She knew the voice.

It pleaded with her, mockingly.

"Don't go, Beverly. I'll worry. We'll both worry... _a lot_."

\---

Bev always wanted to let her hair fly loose behind her, as she drove a convertible at a ridiculous speed down an empty stretch of highway. She'd seen in a movie once. The heroine wore sunglasses and was laughing, head tipped back in the sunshine. To Bev, that was the look of joy.

The look of triumph.

\---

Derry, Maine. It sounded made up, when she said it out loud, when they asked where she was from. As if the places she went didn't all seem foreign and made-up. The Sears Tower, for instance, surely that was leftover from the fairy tale?

One time, she thought of the Barrens when she saw a field in Illinois. Outside some small town. She could see a dip in the field that might have been a creek, and she stopped long enough to stare down into that field and wonder if she might really be eleven years old, all gangly limbs and unkempt hair. If she ran down there, would she find them, all of them, reading comics and planning for a trip to the movies?

There was a laugh then, from somewhere down there. It sounded like her dad, it sounded like Henry (who was Henry?) and it sounded like fear.

She got back in the car, slamming the door, her fingers numb as they closed around the wheel.

Derry, Maine. She drove back to Chicago as fast as she could, and the closer she came, the more convinced she was that Derry was all in her imagination, after all.

\---

Bev almost remembered everything, one night not long after she met Tom Rogan.

They had been out together, drinking. Bev went easy on the wine, Tom went heavy on the whiskey, and it was natural that if they were going to end up sleeping together, it would start in her car. She had no control over some things in her life; this was one place she liked to think she did.

Tom had pulled her onto his lap, anxious to slip his cock out while her skirt covered everything - they weren't in a very deserted place, and he liked to watch, not to be watched. And Bev let him, she helped him, because she wanted it and Tom wasn't like all the others before him.

The trouble that night, Bev never knew. There in her car, in her domain, she was in charge. It was dark - the streetlights dimmed halfway through it - and she thought it felt cave-like. Sewer-like. Damp, and hot, and she thought of birds.

And a red-haired boy who stuttered, except when he said her name when he was inside her.

The name almost escaped her lips - "Bill," she thought, she tried hard not to whisper - but Tom was never the wiser. Not that time.

She rolled down the windows on the way home, and whatever it was, it fled as the wind whipped through her hair.

\---

More than once, she dreamt she hit Tom with that same car.

She never remembered the dreams.

\---

They all came back to Derry, and Derry welcomed them back with open arms and a knife to stick in their backs. Only, they didn't let It kill them all, they won, in their way.

When Bev climbed behind the wheel this time, it wasn't a beat-up relic of a car, and she was not escaping. She didn't have to slam both feet on the gas in her rush, and there was no deep laughter coming from the moon or the drain or anywhere at all.

Ben reached over and put his hand on her knee.

"Where should we go?"

She shrugged her shoulders, and grinned. "Anywhere we damn well please."

When she made love to Ben in the backseat, it was with the top down, and there was nothing on her mind except the wind, whipping her hair.

\---

Independence. Four wheels and an engine and, if she has her way, bucket seats.

She can't wait to hold the keys.


End file.
